The Apache Ant team currently maintains two lines of
development. The 1.9.x releases require Java5 at runtime and
1.10.x requires Java8 at runtime. Both lines are based off of
Ant 1.9.7 and the 1.9.x releases are mostly bug fix releases
while additional new features are developed for 1.10.x.

The latest releases are 1.9.9 and 1.10.1 and 1.10.1 contains
a superset of 1.9.9 - with the exception of a few tasks and
features that no longer work with Java8 anyway (like the apt
task).

The full release notes of the latest releases are below.

Release Notes of Apache Ant 1.9.9

Changes from Ant 1.9.8 TO Ant 1.9.9
===================================
Fixed bugs:
-----------
* Ant 1.9.8 made Path#systemClasspath final which broke the Eclipse
integration.
Bugzilla Report 60582
* the wrapper script still didn't work on Solaris 10, but worked on
Solaris 11.
The "fixed" script should work in most cases but will not preserve
newlines present in command line arguments.
Bugzilla Report 60562

Release Notes of Apache Ant 1.10.1

Changes from Ant 1.10.0 TO Ant 1.10.1
=====================================
Fixed bugs:
-----------
* Ant 1.10.0 made Path#systemClasspath final which broke the Eclipse
integration.
Bugzilla Report 60582
* the wrapper script still didn't work on Solaris 10, but worked on
Solaris 11.
The "fixed" script should work in most cases but will not preserve
newlines present in command line arguments.
Bugzilla Report 60562
Other changes:
--------------
* new tasks <xz> and <unxz> and resource <xzresource> for XZ
compression. Also the compression attribute of <tar>/<untar> now
accepts "xz" as valid value.
The tasks and type are contained in the new ant-xz.jar and require
the library XZ for Java to be on the CLASSPATH.
Bugzilla Report 60350